Celebrating St Pancras Day

I like to think I was the first (indeed I may have been the only) journalist to have been invited to climb the scaffolding under the clock at St Pancras station. That was back at the beginning of May, when the refurbishment of what is, from today, London’s Eurostar terminus still had a little over six months to go. The whole place was a mighty confusion of construction activity, large-scale and small, high-tech and low: I remember watching a man pouring what looked like hot tar for the floor surface of the main entrance out of the corner of a battered old wheelbarrow. ‘Some things on building sites never change,’ said the project manager, Clive Livermore, who had just explained to me the electronic personal ID systems he was using to stop sub-contractors and work gangs signing in and claiming pay for fictitious extra workers called Mickey Mouse or Tony Blair.